Responsible Innovation of Touchless Haptics: A Prospective Design Exploration in Social Interaction

The rapid development of touchless systems has introduced many innovations in social interaction scenarios in recent years. People now can interact with touchless systems in social applications that are aimed to be used in everyday situations in the future. This accelerated development makes us ask, what will the next generation of touchless systems be like? How can we responsibly develop new touchless technologies in the future? To answer the first question, we brought together 20 experts to ideate, speculate, and evaluate possible touchless applications for social interactions. A total of 48 ideas were generated from two consecutive workshops. Then, to answer the second question, we critically analyzed those ideas through a thematic analysis using a responsible innovation (RI) framework, and identified key ethical considerations to guide developers, practitioners when designing future touchless systems. We argue that the social scenarios described, and the RI framework proposed in this paper are a useful starting point for responsibly designing the next generation of touchless systems.